While Pacita’s propensity to take her paintings into the realm of social inquiry may be most evident in figurative works like the “Immigrant Experience” and “Masks and Spirits” series, her borloloy, “tropical aesthetic” and ornamental lexicon serve to activate the political possibility of abstraction. As a woman of color whose life was often in transit but whose vision was global, Pacita cannot be easily balkanized into a singular category. In Fresh Talk/Daring Gaze, Faith Ringgold points out that Pacita’s sense of coloration augments the visibility of both her work and person and relates it to the experience of sexism and racism faced by the racial others. Viewed through such lens, color is the thread that connects the various cultural, economic and historical peripherals and a way of standing with diasporic or marginalized communities. Pacita’s abstractions transmute cultural specificity into collectivity, inverting the mechanics of marginalization while carving out a new space in which cultures, identities, and materialities may intersect and form new meanings. 

Including paintings from important private collections as well as from the Pacita Abad Art Estate, this solo presentation will be one of the first in New York City devoted to Pacita in over twenty years. The exhibition takes place concurrently with a major traveling retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curated by Victoria Sung with assistance from Matthew Villar Miranda. The retrospective will travel to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto;and MoMA P.S.1, New York. Abad’s works are in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern Museum, M+ Hong Kong, National Gallery Singapore, National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Walker Art Center, and major institutions around the world.